Rex Smith: Reporters, not angels, on a pin tip

Now, a few hundred years removed from the Medieval Age, we’re not so sure whether scholars of that era actually did debate how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. But if not that specifically, they did surely take on some similarly pointless disputes. In the 13th century, for example, Thomas Aquinas explored whether hair and nails would continue to grow in the afterlife, and at what time of day (or night) the dead would be raised.

So an editor should not feel bad about delving into the question of what a journalist is. It’s not as irrelevant as you may think. Indeed, this very topic is the substance of current debate in Congress, and we know from experience that only important matters engage our elected representatives.

Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill to give journalists a shield under federal law from having to reveal the names of confidential sources in most instances. There are a lot of exceptions, notably when national security is at stake, but the overall impact of the bill would be to help preserve aggressive reporting by protecting whistleblowers and others whose careers or even lives could be at risk if their identity is exposed.

Next the bill will go to the Senate floor for debate and presumed passage, then to a conference committee where it will be reconciled with a similar House-passed bill, and then both houses will have to pass the resulting compromise before it is sent to the president for signature. Only then will federal courts uniformly give reporters the shield law protection that most state courts already provide.

But to whom? Let’s say somebody who works in a public-sector job whispers to you details about (outlandish as this sounds) a top official using public employees for personal business and trading on his state job to get rich. And imagine you post that on your blog on www.imrealsmart.com, and that the FBI decides it needs to talk to your friend to build a case against the enriched official. Only your friend made you promise not to reveal his identity for some reason. Maybe he’s worried he could lose his job and thus the health insurance that provides the medicine that keeps his sick kid alive.

The pending shield law would protect you — that is, it will if you regularly collect and disseminate information in the public interest. In other words, if you’re a reporter. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never made a dime off that blog or never worked for an established news organization. In effect, the bill says you’re a journalist if you practice journalism.

This is not quite the same question as the similar one that confronts all first-semester journalism students nowadays, whose professors regularly ask them some version of this: Are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the fake newscasters on Comedy Central, not only entertainers, but also journalists? Are Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck? And if the answer to the last question is yes, then what about Jay Leno and David Letterman?

Stewart and Colbert have audiences about the same size as Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and PBS’s Jim Lehrer. Two years ago, when researchers asked Americans to name the journalist they most admired, Stewart came in fourth, tied with NBC’s Brian Williams and others. Both Stewart and Colbert insist they’re not doing journalism, but it’s clear that a lot of people turn to them as primary news sources, just as others turn to Limbaugh and his ilk.

By the shield law’s definition, all those guys — Stewart, Colbert, El Rushbo, and the rest — are journalists. But in fact, there’s a difference between what they do and what is undertaken daily by the thousands of journalists in small towns and in cities across the country: that is, the reporters who show up at city council meetings, who monitor the behavior of public officials, who share the stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things in our communities.

At its core, journalism is a discipline of verification. Its goal is to give people a view beyond the horizon of their own experience. It demands that practitioners be independent and fairly account for all points of view, rising above inevitable bias to pursue the truth.

I can’t help it if that sounds idealistic. Journalism has a special role in our society. And that’s why journalists — real ones — may occasionally need the protection of a shield law. We’re not talking here about angels on the head of a pin.

At has been my observation, and experience, that “journalists” tend to think of themselves as being special, above the rest of the population. Some think of themselves as higher on Mount Olympus than others. They control the flow of the information the public has and they enjoy that power. Sometimes that makes them smug and goes to their heads. Not always, of course, but there is that tendency. Sometimes it’s amusing, sometimes insufferable.